A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~120,000 words · 550 passages
Cite this work
- APAHenry David Thoreau. (n.d.). A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/a-week-on-the-concord-and-merrimack-rivers
- MLAHenry David Thoreau. "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/a-week-on-the-concord-and-merrimack-rivers.
- ChicagoHenry David Thoreau. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/a-week-on-the-concord-and-merrimack-rivers.
What it is about
Thoreau's first book, of 1849: the account of a two-week boat journey he and his brother John made in 1839, compressed into seven days.
Context and history
He wrote it in the hut at Walden, and the real occasion is not the journey: John had died of tetanus in 1842, suddenly and horribly, and the book is Thoreau's way of going back there. He says this nowhere; the brother appears only as 'my companion', and the grief is everywhere and in no sentence. Each day on the water serves as a thread for digressions on friendship, poetry, the sacred books of India, Christianity and the history of the valley's Indians. It was a complete commercial failure: of the thousand copies he had to buy back more than seven hundred, and he wrote in his journal that he had a library of nine hundred volumes, seven hundred of which he had written himself. 'Walden' came afterwards.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Which in different places are part absorbed by the earth, Part reach the sea, and being received within the plain Of its freer waters, beat the shore for banks. CONCORD RIVER “Beneath low hills, in the broad interval Through which at will our Indian rivulet Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw, Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies, Here, in pine houses, built of new-fallen trees, Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.” —EMERSON. The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history, until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground